The December 6th reading of Mike’s new musical “The Astonishing Return of the Protagonists!” got picked up by Playbill.com:
The FatLab Music Blog
Archive for the ‘The Protagonists’ Category
Last thursday was Alice Ripley day in the studio. She graciously flew in and recorded Eagle Woman for our demo of The Protagonists. This filled in the last missing piece of the puzzle. Now Brent is in the studio with his magic mixing bag soon to be a finished demo.
A big thank you to everyone who recorded with us … you will hear the final mix soon!
Kevin Del Aguila, Alice Ripley & Mike in the studio
Alot of research, planning, and work culminates this week with some exciting things. We’re changing notation programs, installing acoustics improvements in the studio, and completing vocal tracking of Mike’s demo with a visit from a Tony-winning Broadway star.
Switching to Sibelius
I’ve had misgivings about Finale’s seriousness toward the Mac ever since Sibelius released their Mac OS X native app 18 months before Finale. Some of Finale’s OS X implementation (i.e. printing parts as PDF) is still broken even 5 paid upgrades later. Finale’s yearly upgrades are $100, the file formats are not backwards compatible so upgrades are essentially mandatory, yet serious bugs remain unfixed and new features are rarely worth the cost (either pandering to the education market or playing catchup to Sibelius). In addition, I couldn’t even launch Finale 2008 (a “MOTU bug“, they said), but it mysteriously fixed itself in Finale 2009.
We’ve demoed Sibelius 6, tested MusicXML file transfers out of Finale, and had our friend and professional music copyist Alden Terry give us a quick walkthru of Sibelius. The tipping point was Sibelius’ support for ReWire — a potentially exponential timesaver letting us sync vocal arrangements in real-time to our DP projects. We’re convinced, and today we start our transition.
Most of the Sibelius vs. Finale posts I came across were horribly outdated, so I will be live-blogging our transition — warts and all. Look here for my series of blog posts about switching from Finale to Sibelius.
Acoustic Improvements
Last fall, we reconfigured our studio (featuring a snazzy custom desk from KK Audio). This new layout made the acoustic imperfections in our room even more troublesome, but theme park season and general lack of acoustic theory kept me from addressing it.
I saw a college friend’s studio pictures on facebook, and he pointed me in the direction of RealTraps. Mike and I had been reluctant to just ignorantly plaster our walls with (honestly, ugly) acoustic foam, so the panel design already appealed to us. I’ve been corresponding with RealTraps’ on-hand acoustics expert “JWL” who looked at photos of our room and was really helpful in identifying what configuration would give us the most improvements.
I’ve measured our room’s frequency response in its current state, and I’ll do the same afterward. Look here for the results!
Broadway’s Alice Ripley
Mixing is progressing nicely on the 3-song demo for the new Kevin Del Aguila/Michael Shaieb musical, “The Protagonists”. The last vocalist is now confirmed, as Mike wrote earlier.
This Thursday, we’re happy to have Alice Ripley (Next To Normal, The Rocky Horror Show) joining us in the studio singing the part of “Eagle Woman”.
(Fans of Go-Go Beach will also know her from demo track #14: “The Love That Cannot Be”.)
Alice recently won a Tony award for the role of “Diana” in the Broadway musical Next To Normal, and we’re thrilled to have her back again.
We are almost finished recording the cast in our studio. Thought I would share a few pictures that we took with Marc Kudisch, Andy Karl, Michael Marcotte & Lisa Howard. We record our singers in the room known as our bedroom, usually with a lab or two on the bed watching. (Sometimes snoring – it’s not unusual for a singer to stop a take and say: ‘… um, your dog is snoring”).
Just one of the perks of recording at FatLab Music!
Lisa in action at the mic
Mike, Marc Kudisch, Roscoe, Kevin Del Aguila
Mike, Marc Kudisch, Andy Karl, Kevin Del Aguila
Mike & Michael Marcotte
Ms. Alice Ripley is joining our cast of superheroes as Eagle Woman this week in our recording studio for our demo of The Protagonists.
Kevin and I are really excited to have her. Although she will not be sporting her wings and feathers, she will be bringing that incredible voice with her. We are happy to report that the Eagle Woman has Landed!
Last year I started working with bookwriter/lyricist Kevin Del Aguila on a new musical called “The Astonishing Return Of The Protagonists” about middle-aged superheroes trying to recapture past glories. This past week we’ve been in the studio recording demos of the first three songs, and the cast we’ve assembled is amazing and sounds fantastic.
- Marc Kudisch (9 to 5, Assassins, The Wild Party) as Captain Marvelous
- Andy Karl (9 to 5, Legally Blonde, Altar Boyz) as Voltman
- Christopher Sieber (Shrek The Musical, Spamalot) as The Sensational Clump
- Tyler Maynard (The Little Mermaid, Mary Poppins, Altar Boyz) as Fishboy
- Kate Wetherhead (Legally Blonde) as Penelope
- Tituss Burgess (Guys and Dolls, The Little Mermaid), Lisa Howard (9 to 5, Spelling Bee), Cassondra Kellam, and Michael Marcotte (Stephen Schwartz’s Making Good, Seance) as The Citizens
- Todd Alan Johnson (a man of 1000 voices) as The Narrator, Volcanix, and all the other voices.
When everything is mixed, we’ll post the demo tracks here — but for now we’re still waiting to find our Eagle Woman. Coming soon!
